There is more water even than we had thought. It
has taken everything and spread everywhere, and the prophecy of the
men in the night has come true. There are no more trenches; those
canals are the trenches enshrouded. It is a universal flood. The
battlefield is not sleeping; it is dead. Life may be going on down
yonder perhaps, but we cannot see so far.
Swaying painfully, like a sick man, in the terrible encumbering
clasp of my greatcoat, I half raise myself to look at it all. There
are three monstrously shapeless forms beside me. One of them--it is
Paradis, in an amazing armor of mud, with a swelling at the waist
that stands for his cartridge pouches--gets up also. The others are
asleep, and make no movement.
And what is this silence, too, this prodigious silence? There is no
sound, except when from time to time a lump of earth slips into the
water, in the middle of this fantastic paralysis of the world. No
one is firing. There are no shells, for they would not burst. There
are no bullets, either, for the men--
Ah, the men! Where are the men?
We see them gradually. Not far from us there are some stranded and
sleeping hulks so molded in mud from head to foot that they are
almost transformed into inanimate objects.
Some distance away I can make out others, curled up and clinging
like snails all along a rounded embankment, from which they have
partly slipped back into the water. It is a motionless rank of
clumsy lumps, of bundles placed side by side, dripping water and
mud, and of the same color as the soil with which they are blended.
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